Goodbye Montana, Goodbye Idaho, Goodbye Utah, Goodbye Colorado

It's early in the year for us to be saying goodbye to the West, but it is what it is.  The smoke and fires did us in as well as the wind, dust, and heat.

Durango was a nice visit, hardly any smoke at last.  We had to move sites once which took up part of one day, and we managed to get many things done while we were there.  Jan got her hair cut, and we finally hooked up with some fresh vegetables!  We don't understand, but we have never seen any roadside stands or any fresh veg in the west except at a sporadic farmer's market.  But there is a small stand in Durango that had wonderful Olathe corn, delicious tomatoes and green beans, and we made a feast of them!

Settled in to our second site

Oh yeah!

We ran some other errands while in town and tried to tackle a small problem we have been experiencing for some time now.  We have a braking system on our truck that works off the air from our coach's brakes, and there is a small light at the driver's seat that indicates to me when the truck's brakes are applied.  When we were in Florida, we lost the light and after tearing through the whole system and replacing the switch, we found the light had burnt out:-(  But after we hit the road in the spring, we keep blowing the fuse in the truck that controls the light system.  Sometimes it will work for days and days and other times one brake application will pop the fuse.  We talked to the brake system company and they suggested a larger fuse as the run from the truck all the way to the driver's seat of the motorhome is a long way, 55' plus.  We did that and got a day out of it before it blew.  So I decided to rewire from the truck battery, install a new inline fuse holder, and new larger wire to the air actuated switch.

The switch and we replaced the bottom wire, the other wire goes to
the electrical plug at the front of the truck in which we plug our cable
into that also controls the lights on the truck when we tow

Update, it worked for a whole day and half of another until it blew again?!?!

Anyway, back to Durango.  We went up to Molas Pass, just short actually, to Andrew's Lake to take a hike around it.  It was a beautiful cool day.

We had a great time!

Went out to lunch a few more times and sure enough our time came to an end.  We had a lovely last evening and then said goodbye early the next morning.

Now we are on the move with a couple short stops along the way.  We have made our way to Lubbock now and are visiting our daughter and her husband for a few days then we will diagonal northeast up to Buffalo to see our son and fiancé.  Lots of miles:-)

I do want to mention a very cool little campground we visited in the northeast corner of New Mexico called Coyote Keeth.  It is an overnight stop, reasonably priced, 50 amp full hookup park with a kiosk to check in, and you can even make a reservation.  It has 15 pull through sites, first come, first serve, so if you have made a reservation, you pay at the kiosk and go find a site that has an orange cone, easy peasy.  

There is a real need for these quick, easy, reasonable overnight parks, and hope more of them pop up, in fact we'll let you know about another we plan to stay at in Illinois on our way north.  So now Jan and Kelly are off doing stuff and I am trying to figure out why our sink in the galley isn't draining, especially since we just replaced the drain hose.  Grrr.